5 Ways to Get Your Family Excited for a PCS | Military Spouse PCS Prep Tips

Welcome to Tip Tuesdays, where real life meets real tips. I am Tami. I'm a child of [MASKED], plus I'm a licensed cosmetologist. I'm a military wife. I'm a homeschooling mom. I care for my mom who has dementia, a type 1 diabetic who has [MASKED] more times than I can count, both CONUS and overseas. I've walked through deployments, infertility, brain healing, and raising our miracle baby at 40. I will drop practical, faithful, funny, real-life-tested tips to help women thrive through hair care, beauty tips, homeschooling, parenting hacks, military life and PEO survival, self-care and elder care, and health and healing and finding the joy in chaos. I hope you choose to join me. This Tip Tuesday, I am talking about 5 ways— right now we're in— a lot of you who are PEO this year are in the heat of it. It is July. Usually you want to get where you're going and settled by August. Because they tend to do the PCS over school break, even though it doesn't really matter when you homeschool, but that's when they tend to do it. Now, I know a lot of you are in that chaos right now, and I wanted to give you 5 ways to get your family excited for your PCS move. For those of you that aren't in the military, PCS stands for Permanent Change of Station. If you're not in the military, that doesn't mean you can't use these tips. These tips can come in handy if you and your family are moving somewhere else. Let's get on with the tips. I got my sheet of paper here. I'm gonna grab it. Got my notes to help. You say to your family, "We're moving!" Cue the tears, the resistance, and sudden emotional attachment to that Dollar Tree toy that just broke, or the McDonald's freebie that just broke. Here's how to turn your PCS move into something your crew actually looks forward to, or at least doesn't sob about every night after dinner. I managed to do this with our son. Uh, the first time he moved, he was 6 months old and we moved to England. So after that move, he adjusted fairly well to the time change and all that stuff, and he was a baby. Babies are extremely adaptable. But I learned over the years, as he got older and older— the last time we moved with him, he was a preteen. Since then, we've had small moves, but nothing major. But for that first part of his life, we did a lot of moving, a lot of relocating, a lot of figuring life over again wherever we went. And I learned how to make it into an adventure. One of the things I've learned in life is that when you feel overwhelmed, stressed out, scared, anxious, all those feelings, they are the same feelings you get when you're excited. Isn't that weird? Yeah. I turned everything— when we were moving somewhere and my son James would get any of those type of feelings coming through, we would go online and find out what's in the place. We were moving one— when we were here and he was a little bit older, we were moving from DC to upstate New York, and we would go online and investigate what was there. One of the things that he really enjoyed was looking at houses online. You don't know, you don't know until you're actually going through the moving process of trying to help your kid figure out. And you, at that point we were homeschooling and I would just go down any funnel of his interest. So right then it was all about Lightning McQueen. And Harry Potter. Those were his things. So we always involved both of those in what we were figuring out. Sometimes it was hard, but a lot of times it was fun, especially for him. So number 1— Number 1 tip is to give your kids a moving mission. Now for my son, that was what worked for him was when he was feeling that stressful time, I'd tell him, "What can we search for next in upstate New York on the internet? What are you interested in?" So he would think of that while he was packing his stuff in boxes, or like, he didn't— he just had to pack his bedroom basically, and I kind of oversaw. So we also let him be part of the planning So when I was at that point, this was— I don't know what number move this was. There were a lot ahead of it, but I'd learned a lot, and I was labeling all my boxes appropriately. I was very strategic in how I packed things, and that helps. It really does. And he was helping me with that. So I made him a job. They had different colored labels for boxes that— I can't remember what we did. Let's say the kitchen was green and the front room was blue and the bathrooms were pink or those kind of things. James's room at the time, his favorite color was red, so all of his stickers were red if they belonged in his room. And then I, I would write on the outside of the boxes special things that were in that box. But we had these fairly big colored sticky notes to put on, and then I taped down the sticky note to number one, keep it there, number two, make it waterproof. So that was my, my process. And that was great. I mean, I can— a job in his room, he knew not to seal the boxes because I had to look through and see what was in there. But he would get everything in the boxes for me, and that helped, helped me. Number 2, number 2, turn it into a countdown adventure. So if you have, let's say you have 14 days until you're leaving, do a countdown every day, and as you get closer, do the countdown by hours. But I found sometimes that was a little too much for my son. He didn't like that one. And when he was even younger, we did it by sleeps. Okay. So 5 more sleeps and we're going, we got a plane ride or we're driving or whatever. So that, that's— They all— I never did this. We did a dry erase board, but I've heard of making paper chains, make a paper chain and each day they can pull off one of the chain. And see how many are left. You can also put special incentives on there, that kind of stuff. So, and this is something that we did. I did this in— I'm a crazy Trello board user, and I had a Trello board that I would copy each time we moved to try and keep track of everything. And this move that we did from DC to upstate New York was the first move we did without military help. So it was all on us. And it was, in all honesty, I know I had to do all the packing, well, the majority of it, but I found it was better to not have a bunch of people come in and pack my stuff. We just had a bunch of people come in and take the boxes and put them on the trucks. because the company that had hired my husband to go to upstate New York, they paid for the actual movers to come and get the boxes and to move us. So that's just my humble opinion. I don't like people coming in and touching my stuff and all that kind of stuff, but it is what it is. So what I did in my Trello board was I had a new place bucket list. So as we were searching online and looking at things in Upstate New York, it'd be like, oh, they have a really nice zoo in Syracuse, so we put that in there. Oh, we're going to be like a couple hours drive from New York City, which means we're going to be a couple hours drive from Niagara Falls. So that was one of our goals, to get to Niagara Falls. Unfortunately, we weren't there long enough to to do that because we also had to dig out of debt at that point because of— we had to pay for whatever. That's, that's here neither here nor there. So our bucket list included things that we wanted to do right away. One of the things I look into is coffee shops. And in Upstate New York— I'm Canadian, and they had Tim Hortons. So I was so freaking excited about Tim Hortons. I used to love Tim Hortons coffee, but now I'm mostly an iced coffee drinker, and my husband makes the best coffee, so I don't have to worry about it. But they also have these sour cream donuts at Tim Hortons. Whoa, probably shouldn't have started eating those again, but they're good. So number 1, give your kids a moving mission. Mm-hmm. Number 2, turn it into a countdown adventure. Number 3, create a new place bucket list. Now I find number 4— this is something that took me a long time to figure out. It's really hard. This is, this is where I, I don't feel like ever did totally correctly. Celebrate the goodbyes. It's much easier to do in my opinion, when you're the one that's leaving, because you've got an adventure ahead of you. But all those people you're leaving behind, their hearts have an empty place. They don't have an adventure coming up. They're very sad. I'll talk about this eventually, but I had that hit me when we lived— we lived in England, and my be— who lived next door, her family moved back stateside, and I was utterly devastated by it. It was like the worst experience of my life. And did like the typical things that I was doing, like get ready for a p— move. You tend to disconnect from all your friends because you know it's going to hurt. And there's just things. And when your friends offer to help, swallow your pride and say, "Thank you, I could use some help." When we moved back stateside from England, because of what I went through with my girlfriend Julie, when I had a few girlfriends offer to help in certain ways, one of them was Gina, and I don't know, she had 5 million kids. Well, maybe 7, I think, 6 or 7 of them, but She had a lot of children and I had one. And she basically said, "Bring James over, let him hang out with me for the day and you can take care of stuff at home." And my initial response was, "Oh no, that's okay. You don't need another kid in your home." And her answer to me was, "What's one more in my home?" And I was like, "Oh." So I said, "Yes, please." And that was a very productive day for me in the home. At that point I was both doing cleanup and finalizing packing prior to the movers coming. Like, they, they come and pack you out and put your stuff on these big containers to go overseas. But that was a relief for me. And then after that, when I had girlfriends that invited me over and stuff like that, I used to pull away and say, "Oh no, I've got to do this, I've got to do that." But I decided not to do that on that move, and it made a huge shift in my brain. And my main reason for doing that is because James at that point was 3 years old, and I wanted him to spend time with his friends too. So that, that was a— Celebrate the goodbyes is huge. It takes a lot of effort on your part, Mom. A lot because we think if we pull away and hide, it's going to be better, and honestly, it isn't. So take number 4 and take it to heart. Number 5: Hype it up with faith and fun. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm a child of God. I follow Jesus Christ, and I try to involve God in as much as I can in my life. And I try to talk to him all the time. Sometimes he probably gets tired of me, but I don't care. So you need to remind your family and yourself, remind yourself that God is going before you. And if you're unsure of that, start asking him to. God, can you please prepare a way for us when we get there? Now I'm going to tell you a story. When we were moving from D.C. to upstate New York. D.C. was also the beginning of our foster parenting journey, and I had to say goodbye to a foster daughter there. So that was really— oh my gosh, that was extremely difficult. She was a teenager. I also learned at that point that when I do foster care, that the foster child should not be older than my child. because it kind of invited a lot of things into his life that shouldn't have been in his life. But when we moved to upstate New York, I didn't go through this process of asking God to go ahead of me, asking God to guide us, asking like— and I've gotten into the habit now of not asking, thank him for it. And that seems to— like, I'm expectant, I guess. Like, I say things like, "Thank you, God, for going ahead of us and preparing the way. I really appreciate it. Thank you, God, for helping us to make the right decisions and come to you when we need you." Stuff like that. Like, it's just— I don't know. To me, it's God. If to you it's a higher power, then talk to your higher power, whoever it is— God, Jehovah, Yahweh. I don't know, people, there's something there, okay? There is. I call him God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. So those are my, my jam. But so you can, if you, if you— God and want to pull Bible with your children, that's One Good One. Make sure your children understand that God is with them and will help them through this move if they keep talking to him. It's a dialogue. It's not a— we don't— you don't want to pray out of desperation. You want to dialogue with God. Talk to him every day. Thank him every day. And that will help. So I'm going to go through these one more time with you. Give your kids a moving mission is number 1. Number 2, turn it into a countdown adventure. Okay. Number 3, create a new place bucket list. Number 4, goodbyes. Huge. And number 5, which is another huge one, hype it up with faith and fun. So don't forget about the fun part, okay? Keep it fun for your kids, whatever fun is for them and for you. I mean, for me, I loved going to the zoos. So what we looked at a lot on the, on the internet. So it doesn't have to be meltdown time for you or the kids. I know it's hard, Mom. I've been in it quite a few times and I know it's hard. You will get through this. And you will get stronger through it. And hopefully my tips will help. If you would like, I have a printable PDF with all these tips on it and some more ideas in there of different things to do. If you would like a copy of that, please let me know. How can you let— well, I will include the link to my— to where the document is Sorry. In the video description, as soon as I have it all set up, and you can go right there and just go through the— get your free printable, print it out. It's there. It's handy dandy. If you cannot print it out, save it on your phone, save it on your computer, whatever you got to do. If you're in the middle of your move, just go and save it to your phone so that you can reference it and be like, oh, okay, I gotta help my kids do this. They're whining, crying, they're like having a hissy fit at the Target or whatever. Like, I remember James when we first moved— this is kind of funny, okay? Here's my funny for you. When we moved back to— from England— England is very much the way that I figured it out because I, I come from Canada, so I compare the three countries, okay? So England doesn't have a lot of choices, all right, when it comes to shopping and products and all that stuff. There's just not a lot of choices. America, the United States of America, there are way too many choices here, guys. It's so overwhelming, it's not even funny. And Canada is in the middle. There's more choices than England, less choices than America, at least when I lived up there. That was like 20-some years ago now, so that's what I remember. So, back to America, I mean, James was like 6 months old to 3 years old in England and just did what we did, you know. To him, McDonald's was the M store. He actually thought they would sell us M's in there. It was so funny. funny, so cute. I'm like, oh man. Whereas all the kids his age down here, they know that's McDonald's, you know. He didn't know that. He— it was the M store. That about him. And we moved back here, and the first time, like, I was so excited to go to Walmart, okay? I was like, oh my gosh, I get to go to— because I never came back stateside when we were over there. And we were there for 3 years. So I go into, I like to call it Wally World, and I was in there for not even a minute and I turned around and I walked out. My husband's like tailing behind me and he's carrying James and I'm just like, can't. I, I, whoa, but phew, way too much. So the next time I went, I worked myself up to it and I took James this time, and Paul was working. He was back to work on base. He might have been deployed that time. I can't really remember. They all kind of mush together after a while. But James had a literal middle of the toy aisle because he wanted everything, and I told him no. And I had never experienced that with him before. I was just like, "Whoa, what is this?" So I got him back in the stroller that I had, took him out to the vehicle. I didn't buy him anything. I let him melt down the rest of the way in the vehicle. And it was then that I was like, "Wow, that's— yeah, it's too much for him right now." So be aware of stuff like that. Yeah. When you go overseas and your kids are a little bit older, they will probably have meltdowns for the opposite reason. It won't be too many choices. It will be not enough, depending on where you're going and depending on where you're shopping too. If you're shopping on base, then it's, you know, still there's more choices. It's more like the BX would— in overseas would be more akin to to shopping in Canada. So that's what I gotta say about that. I hope you get some value out of this, and I hope to see you in my next Tip Tuesday. Have a great day or evening. Bye! Bye!